John Calipari

John Calipari

Head Coach

Kentucky Wildcats

446-139

Larry Brown

Marcus Camby (UMass), Edgar Padilla (UMass), Carmelo Travieso (UMass), DaJuan Wagner (Memphis), Shawne Williams (Memphis), Derrick Rose (Memphis)

After a nine-year run at the University of Memphis, highlighted by a run to the national championship game in 2008, John Calipari is taking over one of the most storied programs in all of basketball -- the University of Kentucky.

One can only assume he'll be successful in Lexington. Through his first 15 seasons, Calipari amassed 374 victories -- a 15-year mark surpassed only by hall-of-famer Roy Williams. He is one of only two coaches to bring two different teams to the final four.

Coach Cal's career on the bench started immediately after his 1982 graduation from Clarion State, as an assistant to Ted Owens at Kansas. He stayed on when the legendary Larry Brown took over at KU in 1983, then left for Pittsburgh in 1985, where he worked as an assistant to Paul Evans until getting his first head coaching position at UMass in 1988.

Calipari turned the Minutemen into a power, winning the Atlantic 10 tournament for five straight years from 1992-96. The '96 team capped reached the Final Four, losing to eventual champion Kentucky. But that season was marred by the news that Marcus Camby had accepted gifts from an attorney and aspiring player agent. The university was forced to return $151,000 in NCAA Tournament revenue (an amount that Camby repaid) and stripped of its four tournament victories. Calipari was never implicated in the controversy.

He left UMass after the Final Four run and was named head coach of the New Jersey Nets. He had some success in the NBA, leading a perennially-bad Nets squad to the playoffs in his second season, but ran afoul of the media after a heated post-game exchange with a reporter. The following season the Nets got off to hideous 3-17 start and Calipari was fired.

He spent the 1999-2000 season on the Philadelphia 76ers bench as an assistant to Larry Brown before taking the Memphis job.

Calipari's high-energy style proved a good fit for the Tigers. They won the NIT in Calipari's second season and have made six trips to the NCAA Tournament in the last seven years -- and generally dominating Conference USA, with 59 straight wins and four straight conference titles. It seems reasonable to expect him to bring the Wildcats back to the top of the SEC in short order.

Controversy

Some of Calipari's tactics raised suspicion over the years, most notably his association with William Wesley, an enormously powerful figure in the basketball community, who reportely played a significant role in the recruiting of DaJuan Wagner.